With the luck she’s had late in races, that 20-second lead over fourth place may as well have been two seconds. She kept thinking she’d have a flat tire, or a cramp. In fact, with the way she’s lost races in the past, for all she knew ghosts of 797-year-old Hadleigh Castle would swoop in and throw her bike into the nearby North Sea.

But, after a season of heartbreak, the Fort Collins resident had her best race of the season to earn an Olympic bronze medal here Saturday.

Gould overcame a poor start, emerged with a group of leaders, broke away in a medal group of three and held on to third place.

For mountain bikers, the Olympics are a different experience. It’s on the last two days of the Games. The bikers skip the Opening Ceremonies. They stay in a rural hotel instead of the celebratory Olympic Village.

“It feels like another World Cup race,” said Lea Davison, Gould’s teammate who finished 11th.

Gould didn’t get to England until last weekend. She stayed near the course here on Hadleigh Farm, a 700-acre educational farm purchased in 1891 to help London’s poor and destitute. The U.S. mountain bikers spent one night in the Olympic Village. That was enough.

“Definitely the Olympics are different than any other race,” Gould said. “As soon as you come to the Olympics you know that. I made the decision to stay out here closer to the venue because it is an overwhelming experience to stay in the Village.”

After finishing second in a test event here last summer, she knew every nuance of the difficult 2.9-mile course. She knew the steep, boulder-strewn path that followed a thigh-crushing climb. She knew the tricky switchbacks on Snake Hill.

What she didn’t know was the flat start would be so tricky. On a sunny, cool day perfect for a Colorado mountain biker, Gould got stuck near the back and had to fight to latch on to the caboose of a lead group of nine.

“It was a tough start,” said Gould, clutching her bouquet of podium flowers in one hand and a water bottle in the other. “I sort of picked the wrong side to line up on and sort of went backwards.”

During the first few rock sections, the field began to string out. She was losing time fast. But she wasn’t losing patience.

“I noticed up ahead there was some cat and mouse going on,” she said. “They weren’t just drilling it so I thought I still had a chance to make it to that front group.”

She reached that front group at the end of the first of six laps. Then very quickly that lead group became the medal group. Riders were spit off the back like pebbles from rear tires. By Lap 3, Gould had joined France’s Julie Bresset and Germany’s Sabine Spitz and had put 21 seconds on the chase group. It wasn’t long before Bresset showed the world the future of women’s mountain biking. Only 23, she started pulling away and when Spitz went over her handlebars in front of Gould on the rock ledge, it held up both of them. Bresset cruised home for gold with a time of 1 hour, 30:52.

The rest of the world focused on the battle for silver and bronze. Gould, 32, was focusing on a medal of any color, period.

It was at this point of the race when the past began haunting her. At a World Cup race in Mont-Sainte-Anne, Canada, on June 25 she developed a cramp in her leg on the last lap and lost a lead and finished second. The next weekend, in Windham, NY., she suffered a flat tire, lost another lead and finished third. She still has never won a World Cup race.

But, she wasn’t about to lose an Olympic medal. Russia’s Irina Kalentieva, a two-time world champion, got within 20 seconds of her but no closer. Gould finished 1:08 behind Bresset, six seconds behind Spitz and 33 ahead of Kalentieva for the first medal for Team USA in the event since 1996.

“It is in the back of your mind,” Gould said of a late-race disaster. “Just because you made it up that last hill doesn’t mean something can’t happen in the last minute of the race.”

Nothing happened. Her bike didn’t land in the North Sea. Instead, she landed in the arms of her husband, who came out from Fort Collins along with her parents from Baltimore and grandmother who had one great 80th birthday present.

This farmland may be a long way from the Olympic spirit, but on Saturday afternoon, the Olympic torch found itself inside the soul of Georgia Gould.

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